Onyx Boox Max2

Pros

Cons

Pen doesn't work well with third-party apps.
No front light.
Lacks dual-band Wi-Fi.

Bottom Line

The Onyx Boox Max2 is an impressively capable Android tablet with a 13.3-inch E Ink screen and a useful stylus...but it costs as much as an iPad Pro.

23 Feb 2018

PCMag writes thousands of reviews each year, so it's rare that we encounter a product that is truly unique. But that's the best way to describe the Onyx Boox Max2. It's a gigantic E Ink-based Android tablet, with a touch screen, pen, and full Android application support. It's quirky, and it doesn't stop you from trying to do entirely inappropriate things with E Ink. But as a large (13.3-inch!) E Ink tablet, it's wildly functional and easily outpaces the Sony Digital Paper DPT-RP1. But at $799.99, it also costs as much as a 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Hardware and Features

Kindles only go up to 7 inches, and Kobos only go up to 8. They're fine for reading best sellers, but for large-format PDF documents, academic journals, textbooks, and sheet music, traditional ebook readers are just too small. That's when you need to turn to a larger tablet.

The Onyx Boox Max2 is a big black slab, at 12.8 by 9.3 by 0.3 inches and 19.4 ounces. Heavier than an iPad, it's not something you want to carry around in one hand for long.

Below the 13.3-inch, 2,200-by-1,650 touch screen there are four physical navigation buttons. There's also a headphone jack, micro USB and micro HDMI ports, and a fabric loop to hold the included stylus. (The pen has a clip that hooks onto the loop.) You can't see it, but there's a tiny, tinny speaker, too.

The screen itself looks great. It's E Ink Carta, the same as on the Kindle Paperwhite, at 207 pixels per inch, with a range of fonts and sizes. It's missing a front light, so you can't read it in the dark, and like all E Ink, it's still 16-bit grayscale. Touch responsiveness is fine. There's some lag in typing on the touch keyboard, but that appears to be more about the refresh rate of the E Ink display than about the touch sensor.

The Boox Max2 runs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow on a 1.6GHz Rockchip processor. It has 2GB of RAM, and 23.6GB of free storage. There's no SD card slot, but 23.6GB is a lot of storage for a reading tablet. With Geekbench scores of 840 single-core and 2087 multi-core, it benchmarks like a decent, midrange smartphone. But of course benchmarks don't really mean anything for performance here, because every action is slowed by the glacial refresh rates of the E Ink screen. For networking, the Boox Max2 has Wi-Fi on 2.4GHz only.

App compatibility is surprisingly good. The previous Boox Max ran Android 4.0, which has security flaws and which some apps no longer support. With Android 6.0, the apps we downloaded from the Google Play store mostly worked. Failures came with games, as you'd expect: Anything that relies on fast-moving screen images is going to struggle, suffer, and maybe crash.

It's hard to test the battery life of an E Ink tablet, but the Boox Max2 didn't need a charge in over a week. Onyx says it gets up to four weeks of use on the 4,100mAh battery. Flipping through a 453-page book in the PDF reader took about three percent of battery life, which is very encouraging. That's much better than on the Sony tablet.

Reader's Delight

So why do you want Android on a big E Ink tablet? For most people, it will be to run multiple document viewing and e-reading apps, and the Boox Max2 is well-suited for that. We tried Kindle, Kobo, Marvel Unlimited, Overdrive, and Onyx's own reading app. Onyx's app handles PDF, ePUB, HTML, DOC, MOBI and CHM files.

There are plenty of ways to get files onto the tablet. It appears as a drive on Windows PCs, when plugged in with a micro USB cable. Since it runs Android, you can also install your cloud storage app of choice and download files, or download files directly using a web browser.

I can't emphasize enough the difference third-party apps, and a current version of Android, make to the utility of this tablet. Unlike other E Ink slates, it's brand-agnostic and relatively future-proof, able to use multiple document sources and read any kind of file. It is not, in any way, locked down.

In Onyx's reading app, PDFs and ePubs of books, magazines, and sheet music all look good. Unlike on the Sony reader, you can jump to a specific page in a long document. PDF hyperlinks work, as does pinch-to-zoom. Shadows can look a bit muddy, especially in color documents, but you can get around that with the manual contrast control. There's a very tinny, computery text-to-speech function that uses the small built-in speaker. You can improve the audio by attaching wired or Bluetooth headphones.

Loading third-party reading apps, Audible, Kindle, and Kobo all worked perfectly (although Kindle needed a firmware update to make its page turns work properly). Marvel Unlimited worked well, although shadows on color pages shown on the black-and-white E Ink screen, as I said above, are a bit muddy. Overdrive has an interesting page-turn behavior that might annoy some people: The left half of the page renders, and then, a noticeable fraction of a second later, the right half. Switching the tablet into "A2," a faster refresh mode, makes the page turns better but makes the text noticeably fuzzy and creates significant ghosting.

The Boox Max2 has a Wacom pen-sensitive layer, and comes with a great, responsive stylus. Since this is Wacom, the pen doesn't need charging, unlike the Sony model. You need to use Onyx's annotation and note-taking apps to make it work properly, but in those apps, latency is very low and the pen feels perfectly smooth. It's pressure-sensitive, but with only 16 degrees of grayscale on the screen, it's hard to take advantage of that much.

You can export your annotations and note pages as PNGs. Palm rejection worked well in the default note-taking app. In OneNote, Evernote, and Inkredible, latency is just too high for the pen to be usable and the lag is intolerable, so we can't recommend the tablet for those applications. It works well for reading notes in OneNote and Evernote—just not making notes with the pen.

E Ink for Your PC

Over the years I've heard about folks who just want an E Ink screen as their primary PC, because they have a problem with LCDs. The Boox Max2 works with web browsing, e-mail, and other standard Android apps, and you can attach a Bluetooth keyboard or headset. But you have to be a real E Ink aficionado.

There's a significant delay in scrolling through web pages and typing text, again because E Ink is a slow medium. There are also rendering errors in the web browser: white text on a black background displays as all black, for instance. Google Maps loads, but you need to fiddle with the contrast to see streets well.

The Boox Max2's weirdest feature is that it can act as a secondary monitor for anything with an HDMI out, such as many PCs. That's not a good idea with E Ink, because PC applications just assume that your screen has a higher refresh rate: moving a mouse and dragging windows around on an E Ink screen has a disturbing amount of lag. It's best used to just let a static image sit for reference. Even without this feature, though, the Boox Max2 is pretty great.

I'm a little concerned about service and support. Onyx is a China-based company, and while it's responsive to user queries on Amazon (as well as to my own), it's very far away and its English isn't the best. With an $800 product, I want a US-based service and support team, and Onyx doesn't have that on offer.

Comparisons and Conclusions

The Onyx Boox Max2 is a giant ebook reader, a top-notch note-taking tablet, and a full Android device. While we would prefer better third-party note-taking app support, the Boox Max2 is by far the most capable E Ink device we've ever seen.

Previously, we preferred the Sony Digital Paper DPT-RP1 to the original Boox Max. The Max2 has turned that around: It has a touch screen and a better pen, it's less expensive, and it runs a reasonably current version of Android. Because the Sony DPT-RP1 is lighter, it's still a better buy if all you want is a container for your PDF documents.

The Boox Max2 is so much more, though. Its ability to run multiple reading applications means that it works with all of your books, no matter what store or library you got them from, without conversion. Its ability to run different cloud and document storage applications lets you get at all your files, wherever they are, mark them up and send them back. And all of this takes place on the largest E Ink screen possible.

The Boox Max2 costs the same as a 12.9-inch iPad Pro or a good Windows tablet. Those tablets are better for creative use, and, of course, they have color screens. But they're LCDs, which is a different beast entirely. We still recommend those tablets more for most people, but there is a small group out there that will be very happy with the Max2.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.

Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed to the Frommer's series of travel guides and Web sites for more than a decade. Other than his home town of New York, his favorite ... See Full Bio